Honeybee populations are declining all over the world, thanks to an issue known as colony collapse disorder. But at the Royal Ontario Museum, in downtown Toronto, thousands of the bees simply dropped dead.
20,000 bees in total died, the entire population of a biodiversity exhibit at the museum, which let people view the bees through a glass-walled hive. The museum doesn’t believe the mysterious deaths have anything to do with CCD, mainly because the bees didn’t disappear: instead they simply died. The cause is now being investigated.
“It’s kind of like playing Sherlock Holmes, in a way, where you look for certain symptoms and you can diagnose different problems,” head beekeeper Janine McGowan told the CBC.
Some potential potential explanations include a low population that either froze or starved to death, or a lack of procreation amongst the bees.
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